


if you yell like that, you'll wake the dead

by elle_stone



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Post 4x11, Suicide, Suicide Attempt, a depressing version of a fix-it fic, canonverse, references of a sort to major character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-16
Updated: 2017-05-16
Packaged: 2018-11-01 08:09:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10917804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: I woke up with the taste of metal in my mouth back from the dead





	if you yell like that, you'll wake the dead

**Author's Note:**

> Summary from _Naked Lunch_ by William Burroughs.
> 
> I wrote this in a couple of hours and barely edited it. Apologies for mistakes. I just wanted it out and not to think about it again.

Jasper wakes up underground with a gold coin in his mouth, soaked through with sweat. He takes the coin and sets it on the table. His mouth tastes like scrap silver and rust, and his head is full of cotton, and his skin burns. 

He sits up slowly and then gets to his feet. His body feels like someone else’s body, and the afterlife looks like prison. Not exactly what he expected, but he’ll take it, because what else can he do? There are eleven other cots in the room, all empty, as neatly made as his own: like someone took great care in creating this room of hollow concrete and stone, accenting it with the slightest hints of home.

He’s circled twice and returned to his cot, picked up the gold coin and is staring at the minute lines scarred around the edge, when the door opens, a heavy slab of metal scraping against stone, and his gaze shoots up.

It’s Monty standing there in front of him, unmoving, which sends another surge of brackish backwater flooding round his teeth.

“I thought I told you to keep your suit on,” he scolds. Monty just stares at him, like the people in the black-market horror movies used to stare at ghosts.

He doesn’t say anything, so Jasper tries again. “Did you not make it in time? If you wasted time trying to move my body—”

“Raven said you might be—”

Their words overlap so that, each thinking he’s cut off the other, they stop at the same time and just stare. Monty crosses the room, takes his red sweater off, and put its over Jasper’s shoulders. He pushes back Jasper’s sweat-soaked hair, with a tenderness that the real Monty never could have mustered. It would be nice if he could act like his old self, but maybe dying changes a person. Maybe this is something else Jasper will have to get used to.

“How much do you remember?” Monty asks, as his hand slides down to rest against Jasper’s cheek. Jasper can read every minute detail of hesitation in him. Like he knows he should pull away, but he can’t. How his tongue flicks out again his lips. How his breathing is unsteady.

“Everything. Right up to the last moment.”

“So you heard me—?”

“I heard you telling me not to do this.”

“Oh.” Monty’s hand drops away at last, and he takes a blind step back and sits down on the cot across from Jasper’s, his elbows on his knees. “Not the rest?”

Jasper tries out smiling, which feels different under the dirt than it did against the burning sky. “That was for you anyway. I’m proud of you, that you said it.” Then he ducks his head and hides his face in his hands, feels his own radiation burned skin against his palms. And when he looks up: “I guess it doesn’t matter anymore anyway.”

“I guess not,” Monty echoes.

Monty’s staring at him with an unreadable combination of curiosity and disbelief. It’s weird that Monty’s here first, that he seems settled in and like he knows the rules. Another reminder of how much there is to learn.

“Jasper?”

“Yeah?”

Monty’s nose crinkles and his brows lean in, and a selfish gratitude spikes in Jasper’s heart. How he would have missed this expression, this pure Monty face, if he’d never been able to see it again. This is what Monty looks like when he’s gathering his words. When he’s found a question he can’t answer and he _hates_ it.

“Were—were any of these last two months real? The joking, the laughing, was it just an act? So we wouldn’t think you were serious?”

Jasper’s own smile falters and falls away. He pulls at the edges of Monty’s sweater to wrap it tighter around himself. “It was real,” he answers. “I was…completely truthful with you, Monty. The whole time. You knew it was coming. You just didn’t _want_ to know.”

Monty’s still shaking his head, over and over. Shaking away all of the truths he doesn’t want to know. “How can you say that—you weren’t _happy_. I broke my promise to you.”

“No—” His hands shake, his fingers reaching out, curling around air. If he leaned in a little further, he could grab Monty’s hands in his. He’s almost there, grasping, mouth forming around words without voice. “No, you _didn’t_. Don’t you understand? I made my decision, I lived my life—more fully at the end than I _ever_ _had_. Don’t you see? It’s so _freeing_ , to know it’s the end—”

“But it wasn’t the end!”

This is the way he shouted when he tried to shove his fingers in Jasper’s mouth (they tasted a little bit like metal too, like plastic and black rain and dirt), and at first, Jasper can only blink at him.

Then—“Careful,” he says, lightly. “If you yell like that, you’ll wake the dead.”

Monty scowls at him, and half-turns away. Only half, like he couldn’t walk out if he tried. “You still think this is funny.”

Jasper stands up and turns his back. He pulls his arms through the sleeves of the sweater. He pokes his thumbs through the holes in the sleeves. “What else would you have had me do?” he asks, finally.

“I don’t know.” The first time he says it, he still sounds angry. The second time, softer, and more broken, Jasper’s afraid the words are almost tears. He will not be able to stand it if he sees tears on Monty’s face. Even the yelling was better than tears. “I don’t know. But we’re—we’ll figure it out. Right? I want to know what you mean by _living_.”

“Isn’t it too late for that?”

He rubs his hands together, feels his fingertips dragging across skin, tries to memorize the way the red fibers feel against his palm. Every sense feels sharp. The cotton in his head is starting to clear. He thought he’d felt the truest, realest sensations on the Earth but nothing compares to the warmth of Monty’s sweater on his cold-sweat chill skin.

“Isn’t it too late?” he says again, as his gaze drifts up toward the ceiling, toward what used to be sky. “People don’t come back from the dead.”

He feels two hands on his arms, then, almost enough to startle, and a moment later the weight of Monty’s forehead leaning against his shoulder. The touch of the hands made him tense but after, because Monty is standing so close, and he’s warm like living humans are warm, Jasper lets all of the tension go. He breathes it out with shaky lungs.

He almost doesn’t hear Monty answer. He feels the words first, then catches on to their echo. They repeat and repeat in a low chant like promises floating through his head. “ _You_ did,” Monty whispers, and squeezes his arms tight. “You did.”


End file.
